If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother? Race, Sex, Class, and Essential Maternity

Abstract

On March 27, 2005, the NEW YORK TIMES’ “Modern Love” column published a piece entitled “Truly, Madly, Guiltily” by Ayelet Waldman.1 A regular contributor to Salon.com, Waldman is also a novelist (including seven “Mommy-Track” mysteries), a Harvard Law graduate, a former public defender, and stay-at-home mother to the four small children that she raises with her husband, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Chabon. About halfway through Waldman’s 1,648-word piece she offers what will be read by many as a startling revelation, that she loves her husband substantially more than she loves their four children. Readers learn that after their twelve years of marriage, Chabon still inspires in Waldman “obsession,” “exhila-rating conversations,” “paroxysms of infatuated devotion,” and lots (and lots) of satisfying marital sex.2 The usually positively charged notion of an “all-consuming maternal desire” that displaces libido for all the best mothers is, according to Waldman, not so good . For Waldman this maternally driven libido quash is not an issue. As her first-person yarn ponders, among other questions, why she is the only woman at Mommy and Me class who “has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make,” she reveals matter of factly that she is “incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe.”